"I don't mind - I'm Welsh."
Jul. 24th, 2020 03:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustCutting edge research into the behaviour of the coronavirus is being carried out by an ENT surgeon who is also a professional tenor. The Guardian's Charlotte Higgins visits the lab and reports on attempts to find out whether wind instruments and singing really are superspreaders of the virus.
It isn't exactly a feel-good piece, because they don't know the answer to that question. They are hoping it will be 'no', but if it's 'yes', at least we will have learned something. Meanwhile, the details of the process are fascinating. For example, to minimise the number of people brought into contact with each other, the instrumentalists are doubling up as singers, some of them rather self-consciously. They sing - what else? - Happy Birthday: except that the team "agonised over" the choice of song, and what made Happy Birthday the winner went well beyond its universal familiarity.
This makes me a little wistful. The article, and the research, is all about whether and how music can be made safe as artistic performance: the nearest it comes to acknowledging singing as a social actibvity is the section about choirs. The research team may have heard Happy Birthday a thousand times in the past few weeks, but we are no closer to singing it in proximity to cake and candles, let alone each other.
Nonetheless, a really interesting report.
It isn't exactly a feel-good piece, because they don't know the answer to that question. They are hoping it will be 'no', but if it's 'yes', at least we will have learned something. Meanwhile, the details of the process are fascinating. For example, to minimise the number of people brought into contact with each other, the instrumentalists are doubling up as singers, some of them rather self-consciously. They sing - what else? - Happy Birthday: except that the team "agonised over" the choice of song, and what made Happy Birthday the winner went well beyond its universal familiarity.
This makes me a little wistful. The article, and the research, is all about whether and how music can be made safe as artistic performance: the nearest it comes to acknowledging singing as a social actibvity is the section about choirs. The research team may have heard Happy Birthday a thousand times in the past few weeks, but we are no closer to singing it in proximity to cake and candles, let alone each other.
Nonetheless, a really interesting report.
